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Sotheby’s London will hold a single cross-category Evening Sale, titled Rembrandt to Richter, at 6pm BST on 28 July, offering more than seventy works that span over five centuries of art history. The accompanying exhibition opens at the New Bond Street galleries, with many works on public view for the first time in decades and hung to draw out connections across artists and periods.
The sale ranges across Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern art, Modern and Post-War British art and Contemporary art. Almost two-thirds of the works have never been at auction before, and of those that have appeared previously, some 70 percent have been off the market for two decades.
Among the leading lots are works by Joan Miró (est. £20 to 30 million), Francis Bacon (est. £12 to 18 million), Rembrandt (est. £12 to 16 million), Henri Matisse (est. £8 to 12 million), Gerhard Richter (est. £9 to 12 million), Fernand Léger (est. £8 to 12 million), Pablo Picasso (est. £6 to 9 million), David Hockney (est. £4 to 6 million) and Alberto Giacometti (est. £4 to 6 million).
The Miró, Peinture (Femme au chapeau rouge) from 1927, dates from the year the artist mastered his lyrical abstract style and ranks among his ‘dream paintings’. Unseen for decades and last at auction in 1966, it was once in the collection of fellow artist Alexander Calder. The sale takes its title from Rembrandt’s 1632 Self-portrait of the artist, half-length, wearing a ruff and a black hat, one of only three of his forty-one surviving self-portraits still in private hands.
Bacon’s Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1986) appears at auction for the first time and depicts the artist’s closest companion and sole heir. Other fresh-to-market works include a recently rediscovered Frans Hals portrait (est. £2 to 3 million), a Rubens portrait of a young woman last exhibited in 1902 (est. £2.5 to 3.5 million), and a Bernardo Bellotto view of Dresden restituted to the heirs of Max Emden in 2019 (est. £3 to 4 million).
Further highlights include Richter’s four-part cloud painting Wolken (Fenster) from 1970 and Banksy’s triptych Mediterranean Sea View 2017 (est. £800,000 to 1.2 million), originally shown at the artist’s Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, with proceeds donated to build a stroke unit and buy children’s rehabilitation equipment for a Bethlehem hospital. Concurrent online Day Sales run for each category from 20 July.
(Press Release)
